TL;DR To make messaging on Reddit faster and more reliable, we’re replacing Private Messages (PMs) with Reddit Chat and inbox notifications. This transition is necessary to maintain and improve Reddit’s messaging infrastructure. We aim to make these changes with minimal disruption while improving the user experience.
Timeline: Starting at the end of March, we'll roll out these changes in phases over the next three months to ensure everything goes smoothly
To better monetize your attention and data, we’ve decided to streamline all communication into a single, ad-optimized, engagement-maximized system. Maintaining multiple messaging systems was cutting into our profit margins, so we’re sunsetting the old one — which, let’s be honest, wasn’t generating nearly enough revenue anyway.
Reddit Chat is engineered for the future (read: future monetization opportunities), unlike PMs, which were quaint relics from a time when this site wasn’t a corporate data-mining operation.
We’re announcing this change now so we can say we “listened” when it inevitably breaks the way you use Reddit. We’ve talked to a hand-picked selection of mods and power users (mostly the ones who didn’t complain too much), but there’s still time for you to provide feedback we can pretend to consider. Drop your thoughts in the comments below, where they’ll be skimmed for marketing insights.
Just a heads up some programs like Redact (for deleting social media posts including Reddit) on iOS require a subscription if you want to delete chat history vs free for dm. I recommend using shreddit anyway, and I would seriously consider you do so asap.
To make Reddit faster, simpler, and easier to use, we needed to unify our messaging platforms. This consolidation helps us focus on improving one system instead of maintaining multiple. Plus, Reddit Chat's infrastructure is built for the future, unlike the PM system which is about as old as Reddit itself.
We’re sharing this change early because we want your feedback! We've spent months talking to mods, developers, and users to ensure this migration works for everyone (shoutout to u/RemindMeBot fans). But there might be scenarios we've missed, and we need your input to address them. You can share feedback directly with the team working on this project in the comments below.
My sides went into orbit. They aren't even trying to come up with believable lies any more, right?
If the concern was to make Reddit "faster, simpler, and easier to use", they'd ditch chat and keep DMs
"muh futchure" fallacy (appeal to novelty)
pretending that they want/care for user feedback
...I think that the reason is twofold: 1) it's easier to plug advertisement into the new chat system, and 2) chat only works in new.reddit so they can use it as an excuse to deprecate yet another old.reddit system.
Oh yeah, chat is such a popular feature. I love how it is constantly full of spam and death threats. Lets elevate that great content to my lock screen.
Some communities I'm interested in aren't on the fediverse, or I get more out of following it on both sites, or I like their custom CSS faaaaaar more than the Mbin design.
I wouldn't say a monopoly, but my counterpoint is pointing to how discord swallowed up all the BBS forums that reddit hadn't. So it's not like that's much better.
Also for context for Lemmy users reading this, this is the link I see:
https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1jf1dy5/https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/1jf1bxy/private_messages_will_be_replaced_with_reddit//
Sync for Reddit does not have a chat function, so I won't be using DMs... Not that I even care for it, I guess my "chat request" feed will be bigger for the next time I check on the desktop website (with Ublock Origin ofc) 😅
It was always a mystery that they maintained two features with basically the same function in parallel for so long. Hopefully they made it better than the last time I gave it a try, because otherwise, oof.